Kids in the Hall: Hyped freshman class could lead to big things for Seton Hall
SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. – Two of Seton Hall's freshmen were longtime teammates at Abraham Lincoln High School near Coney Island in Brooklyn, the same school Stephon Marbury and Lance Stephenson attended and the movie “He Got Game” made famous.
Another freshman came to the United States from the Dominican Republic to play basketball; he lived in the Bronx but came to play with those boys at Lincoln. Yet another went to a private school in Brooklyn, but had been best friends with the most talented of the three Lincoln kids, top-10 recruit Isaiah Whitehead, back when they were 10 years old. Another is from Newark — not far from the Seton Hall campus and not far from Scotch Plains — where junior guard Sterling Gibbs, the team’s leading returning scorer, hails. And the final freshman? A Nigerian kid who went to school on Long Island.
All freshman. All from New York or New Jersey.
In many ways, what Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard is attempting this season — mixing in a six-person recruiting class, one of the nation’s best, with one redshirt freshman plus a bunch of players who’ve played here a good while longer — sounds like a mighty tough task.
In another way, though, it isn’t.
“Because they’re local kids and I’d gotten to know them so well, it’s been a little bit of a smoother transition than you’d think,” Willard told me during a preseason practice for what I think will be the Big East’s most intriguing team. “When freshmen are from all over the place, it’s different. But these guys, they all know each other. They know each others’ games. They all like each other. There aren’t any surprises.”
Willard blew his whistle and stopped practice for seemingly the hundredth time on this recent fall afternoon. It was early in the preseason, before any exhibition game had been played, but Willard still wanted these youngsters to be precise. Some of the players weren’t getting after it as much as Willard thought they should. They weren’t running full tilt. Willard has spent this practice teaching switches on pick and rolls, teaching closeouts on defense, teaching better on-court communication. But he keeps stopping practice to fix fundamentals. It’s a matchup zone that Seton Hall plays, a fairly complicated concept for guys fresh out of high school, AAU ball, and they didn’t always seem to get it.
And right now, they looked a bit lost, and worse, a bit lazy. They looked like ... high schoolers.
“No! No! That’s what you do at Coney Island!” Willard yelled. “We’re in South Orange now!”
And no sooner were the words out of his mouth than the intensity and precision and excitement at practice ramped up.
It has the makings of a fascinating season in South Orange, where Willard is searching for his first winning record in the Big East and his first NCAA tournament bid in his fifth season as Seton Hall head coach. Isaiah Whitehead, a strong, versatile combo guard with a preternaturally calm and mature on-court demeanor, is the jewel of this much-hyped recruiting class — Seton Hall’s best since Tommy Amaker brought top-rated prospects Eddie Griffin and Andre Barrett to Seton Hall way back in 2000. One coach compared Whitehead’s stoic maturity in basketball and in life to that of Jesus Shuttlesworth, the Ray Allen character in “He Got Game.”
And sure, Whitehead is The Guy, but he isn’t the only guy. Angel Delgado, the Dominican who moved to the Bronx, could be one of the best freshman rebounders in this nation this year. (“He just loves rebounding,” Willard said. “He knows that’s what his bread and butter is.”) Desi Rodriguez, a lefty from the Bronx, is a strong and athletic finisher who is a matchup nightmare on offense. Khadeen Carrington, who went to Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn, is a lightning-quick slasher who can really shoot, too. And Ismael Sanogo, the kid from Newark, is a strong and athletic player who crashes the glass.
“They’re young,” Willard said. “They’re going to make some mistakes. But they play hard.”
It has the feel of that newest trend around basketball: the package deal. LeBron and Bosh and Wade all take their talents to South Beach. Good friends Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones head to Durham to play for Coach K, and then convince another talented buddy, Justise Winslow, to join them. And in South Orange — aided by Willard's recruitment of Whitehead’s high school and AAU coach, Tiny Morton, as a Seton Hall assistant — a group of tough and talented New York kids decided they all wanted to play college hoops together.
“It just kind of came about that way,” Carrington told me. “Ish (Sanogo) was the first one who committed, and we all just sort of followed afterward.”
“The first guy I talked to about it was Khadeen,” Delgado said. “He was like, ‘What do you think about us all going to Seton Hall? It’s a great school for all of us.’ And Ismael was the first one to commit, and I’d always told Ismael that I wanted to play with him.”
It will be interesting to see how Willard mixes in the young talent with his returnees, especially junior Gibbs and sophomore Jaren Sina. He told me he’ll likely play Whitehead a lot alongside them in a three-guard lineup.
One thing Willard isn’t worried about is chemistry.
The freshmen love each other. They all moved into the dorms together this summer. They’ll play NBA 2K together for hours. Sometimes they go to Stony’s Restaurant in South Orange and down some cheeseburgers and wings. Sometimes they go into the city, hang out in the chaos that is Times Square. Sanogo is the Jersey kid, so he introduced his teammates to Jersey spots, like a great barber shop in downtown Newark where they all go.
Rodriguez and Carrington have hip-hop dance contests in their dorm rooms – French Montana, Rick Ross – then Delgado will bust in with some Latin music and cracks them up. Whitehead, more quiet and shy than his teammates, just watches and laughs.
And they all have that basketball toughness you expect from kids who are from Brooklyn or the Bronx.
“Summer was intense, workouts all day long,” Whitehead said after that practice. “We’d be in here, playing each other one-on-one. We’d be in here on the weekend until 1 a.m., the weekdays till 10 p.m. Mostly it’s been the freshmen, but it’s all of us really.”
The door is wide open in the Big East this season. There’s Villanova as the conference’s overwhelming favorite ... then a bunch of question marks. Georgetown ought to be back in the mix after last year’s disappointing season with a great recruiting class joining preseason Big East Player of the Year D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera. Despite losing point guard Semaj Christon, Xavier is a Big East dark horse, returning dominant senior big man Matt Stainbrook and hyper-athletic sophomore forward Jalen Reynolds alongside a superb recruiting class. St. John’s is ridiculously talented once again, with sophomore Rysheed Jordan and senior D’Angelo Harrison making up the conference’s top backcourt. Butler will rebound after a difficult, injury-riddled first season in the Big East, and Providence still has plenty of talent despite graduating all-everything guard Bryce Cotton.
There’s plenty of talent in the Big East. But there’s even more fluidity. And there are no sure things.
This is the open door into which Seton Hall and its fabulous freshman can step. Freshmen, of course, will sometimes be freshmen. You don’t have to look back too far – Kentucky, 2013, NIT – to see how frustrating a group of freshmen can be when they don’t gel as a group. Willard has his work cut out for him. But with the most talent that’s been assembled at Seton Hall in a long time, he’s more than up for the challenge.
“You go from playing checkers to chess when you go from high school to college,” Willard said. “You gotta learn what the knight does, what the queen does, what the bishop does. It’s a whole new game at the college level.”
But with these freshmen, it’ll be a whole new game in South Orange compared to last year.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
